- Do search engines care about
multiple sites publishing
the same article?
- Should they worry about duplicate
articles?
- Can you avoid a duplication
penalty if there is one?
First, there is no clear
definition of duplicate content and it is
not absolutely clear there is any such
penalty. The general
belief is repetition of large blocks of the same
article (such as a
syndicated blog post)
either on the same Web
site or on many sites could trigger
a penalty in search engines such as Google.
So why would search engines care about
duplicate content?
If you think about how search engines work
and how they earn their
money, their perspective becomes clear.
Search engines live or die based on:
1. Whether search engine users feel like they get
the results they are looking for
...
2. Whether the advertisers (and thus the search
engine) make good money?
Suppose you publish an article on "How to
write a good article." You submit it to all
of the popular directories and
within a couple weeks it is published on
500
different websites.
If someone were to then go to Google and
search for "how to write a good article," do
you think they would be
thrilled with Google if the first
500
results all linked to your article, but just on
500
different sites?
No way. Searchers probably
would either complain or stop using
Google. And as a side effect, advertisers
would start making less revenue and would
stop advertising. Then Google's
income would drop and they'd have serious problems.
So it becomes clear why any
search engine would not want to display
many copies of essentially the same
article for any given keyword search.
The logical conclusion:
search
engines must filter out as
much duplicate content in the
search results as
possible. If they filter out your website
and display someone else's, even though the
content is the same, it's
tantamount to penalizing you for duplicate content.
Actually, they're just trying to
deliver the best results.
So why don't search engines
give precedence to the original
source of the article?
They simply
can't determine which
is the original and which is
the duplicate? While algorithms can likely
make some logical conclusions, the truth is
that it is not really possible to determine
originality every time.
Instead, search engines have to go by things
like where the content seems to have first
been published, which site is the biggest
authority, etc.
This means that if you publish the same
article on your site and on 100 sites that
are all older and more established, it is
can still seem your site was
republishing duplicate content, not the
other way around.
But ...
There is an easy way to avoid this problem.
Don't publish the same articles on your
website that you submit to the article
directories. You can publish variations, but
be sure they are significantly
different that they won't
get your
site filtered or penalized
for duplicate
content.
Interestingly, this will also work for you
in another way. If your articles are
published on other sites which then all link
to your site, and you don't duplicate any of
the content, your site
can appear to
be more of an authority than the sites
that are all sharing the
same article.
And if your site is on the same theme and
the article directories link to your website
with keyword-rich anchor text, the incoming
links will also indicate to the
search engines that your site is the
authority on that theme. The sites
publishing the duplicate content
might seem less
authoritative.
In a similar way, if you syndicate your
content, be sure to only syndicate the title
and description paragraphs, not the whole
article. That way, your site always has even
more content on the topic, again making your
site seem to be the authority.
This strategy can be far more effective than
publishing the articles on your site. In
fact, if you have been submitting articles
for some time, you may even have seen this
happening already.
As you can see, it's not really a question
of whether there is a duplicate content
penalty or not. Search engines must filter
out duplications to
provide the best results
and to maintain
advertising revenue.
You gain an advantage
if duplicate content is on other
websites that link to yours. Some of those
sites will be filtered out of the search
engine results and some won't. But they will
all point to your site as the actual
authority on your keyword-based theme. Do
this, and any duplicate content will be your
friend rather than your
enemy..
